Quotes About Connection

Prayer catapults us onto the frontier of the spiritual life.

Real prayer is life creating and life changing.

Our prayer is to be like a reflex action to God's prior initiative upon the heart.

It is a hallow feeling to be in the company of someone with whom we long to have a satisfying personal exchange, only to watch hope dissolve as the time together is drained by superficial chatter or surface distractions.

How, then, do we step into the richness and power of this life?

Of all spiritual disciplines prayer is the most central because it ushers us into perpetual communion with the Father.

Maybe the real is the way your palms fit against my face, or the way you hold my life inside you until it is nothing at all, the way this plant droops, this flower called Heart's Bursting Flower, with its beads of red hanging from their delicate threads any breeze might break, any word might shatter, any hurt might crush. — Richard Jackson, Superstition Review issue 2 fall 2008

Sometimes it seems that all our words, even those for love, are written in another language. And yet they still arrive, distant, full of their own silences which may be what allows us to invent another story, what saves us. What is the word for the kind of love the woman shows now? A word that contains the whole story the way her lamp contains her room, — Richard Jackson, from "The Whole Story," Resonance: Poems (The Ashland Poetry Press, 2010)

If you ask me do I love you, I have to tell you that I have never loved you, not even now, not tomorrow. In this way, I can begin to love you again and again because there is no past. This is the way the moon unbutton the stars as it passes overhead. The way even the most distant galaxies continue to tug on us. This is the way I love you. from "If You Ask Me

Maybe I should just lie quietly inside you while our old selves slip in and out of the back rooms of the soul.

Is there any way we can purely touch the world again, the way a salamander does, breathing through its skin? Can we become the strands of this shrine we weave ourselves into hoping to emerge into a world where—where what? There is no end to desire, which means no end to regret, no end to our need for an ending, so that even the sky refuses our touch, that sky which, at its bluest, is the most empty.

There are times when I feel you might be searching for me, when I can read what is written on the far sides of stars. — Richard Jackson, from "Alternate Endings," Resonance (The Ashland Poetry Press, 2010)

How seldom we can see our way to say what we love. — Richard Jackson, from "Elegy Along a Line of Sight," The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems (Press 53, 2022)

Let us get of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind. A something that the ancients thought divine can be found and felt there still.

My heart is fixed firm and stable in the belief that ultimately the sunshine and the summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it were, interwoven into man's existence. He shall take from all their beauty and enjoy their glory.

A gun is like love. The universal language.

To the dead. Let's think of them always, but not join them too soon.

She looks at something in her hand that's beeping at her. It looks like a TV remote fucked a little typewriter and this is the bastard offspring. She types something on the tiny typewriter with her thumbs, and smiles. "What's that you're playing with?" "You've never seen one of these? It's a BlackBerry.

Maybe Sandoval and Roger can share a room. Do puzzles and go to physical therapy together. Maybe discover that they both secretly love Jell-O. Have a real TV-movie bonding experience.

Home late. Be naked.

I don't seem to be alone anymore." "Very well," says Vehuel. "We'd like—" "Shh," he says, holding up a hand. "I'm trying to count." "Of course," Vehuel says in a tone that makes it pretty obvious she's not used to getting shushed.

While food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.

When I live with God in my heart, my future is to live in the Heart of God.

There is no space between love and destiny